After only a few short months of posting on Substack, I found myself sitting and staring at a blank template wondering what exactly I was supposed to be doing. My initial purpose for joining Substack was to get a little of my writing out into the world, to give myself a creative outlet, and to further cultivate my creativity through practice and being in a community of fellow writers. None of those things had happened as of my last post, and I found myself entirely disillusioned by the platform.

Social Media Strikes Again

Substack is often seen as a way to escape social media. In my time there, I frequently read posts by people claiming to have escaped the perils of social media and preaching about the virtues of a more philosophical (i.e. slow) life. I, myself, wrote an article there about disconnecting from social media. And yet…

Substack is social media.

The same algorithms, metrics, and pitfalls of social media pervade Substack. It is essentially Instagram but with words instead of photos and short-form videos. Articles written for Substack must be searchable by popular keywords (hashtags). The same general format is usually followed in each post in order to make the content “Substack friendly.” The same modern, choppy editorial style of writing is celebrated as highly readable regardless of the subject being discussed. Article titles and subtitles are governed by pseudo-intellectual conventions. Vague images are included to fit each article’s aesthetic and to attract the attention of readers in the author’s target corner of the Substack readership.

And that’s where things started to remind me of the worst parts of Instagram, and social media more generally. You may think you’ve found your little corner of the internet, that you’ve discovered your little community of like-minded armchair philosophers on Substack, but there’s a surprise lurking in your feed. Yes, Substack suggests articles and authors to whom you are not subscribed. What a great way to find new content! That is, until you realize that Substack is pushing you articles it knows you will feel strongly about (usually negatively) in order to drive engagement. Instagram does the same thing. Suggested posts and creators are sometimes geared toward your interests, but just as often, they are suggestions the algorithm knows will make you want to click, comment, and ideally, start an argument in the comments in order to increase engagement.

Once I realized that Substack is just another form of social media, it quickly lost its appeal to me.

Why I Write

Perhaps I could have continued with Substack in spite of the bad taste left in my mouth by its social-media-in-sheep’s-clothing feed and community-enforced creative limitations if I had only been writing in order to secure a predictable and easily reachable audience. But, that’s not why I write.

I have now reached that happy time of life called “middle age.” For quite literally decades, I have avoided writing, written things I care nothing about, or started writing and then abandoned the work all because I feared that my real writing was not good enough or would not interest people. That time is over.

My writing very well may not be good enough. There may only be five other people in the world who care anything about the niche interests I enjoy writing about. I don’t care. (Obviously, I am always trying to improve my writing as an exercise in self-improvement and being able to better express my thoughts, but the performative aspect is beyond my concern at this point.) I am writing now because I love to write. It brings me joy, as modern self-help books would say.

Writing is my preferred way of communicating with the world. I think many writers who grew up as “weird” kids feel that way. We could maybe speak to a group or give prepared speeches, but we could never really convey our rich inner world to another person without the time and thinking space provided by writing it down. When I write, I’m not rushed to keep up with the pace of conversation or to get all of my thoughts out before the other person assumes I have no thoughts at all and moves on.

I suppose that’s really what it comes down to: I write because I need to get the ideas inside my head out.

(Enter The Blog)

Blogs seem to have gotten a bad rap in recent years. Everyone who has ever searched for a recipe online understands the jokes about a six paragraph backstory preceding every recipe posted on a blog, ever. With the rise of AI, AI slop blogs have further added to the glut of “writing” taking up space on the internet. Blogs almost seemed to have become the “junk mail” of search engines.

But maybe blogs can make a comeback (if low rise jeans and peplum tops can be popular again, surely blogs are not beyond saving).

Last week, I watched a video by one of my favorite YouTubers (and bloggers!), John Rogers. It was called “5 Reasons to Start a Blog in 2026 (… or any other Year)” and it spoke directly to the hopelessness I was feeling about Substack and my desire to find some other way of making my writing public. I especially liked the idea of a blog being an online version of my notebooks.

Earlier this year, I started keeping a variety of notebooks. In fact, it was after I started to get into keeping notebooks that I found John Rogers’ Studio Notebook YouTube channel in the first place. I have a notebook which serves as a daily log and habit tracker. There are notebooks for each of my current fiction projects. I keep prayer and garden/weather notebooks too. They cover a broad range of the various interests I have. To have a place where I can discuss any of those things without being constrained by algorithms but to have it also be public enough for people to discover my work and my authorial voice, that is I what I had been searching for.

And so, here we are.

What’s Next

Going forward, I’d really like to stay true to why I’ve started this blog. That may mean that there isn’t much of a unifying theme other than it being mine and a manifestation of my creative life, but I’m okay with that. I don’t want to be constrained by a genre, category, or theme. I’d like to share poetry, photographs, news about the progress of my book, essays, interesting quotes, and other thoughts here. It will be a cross between a journal and a commonplace book, and I hope that if you’ve read this far, you’ll stick around to see what’s next!